Agent Carter and the First Avenger
by olivemonkey
Summary: Peggy Carter/Stephanie Rogers genderswap. How would things have been different for a female Captain America in the 1940s?


"I don't much hold with putting gals in uniform," says Colonel Phillips, and has at least the grace to nod in Peggy's direction. "No offense, Agent Carter."

"None taken," says Peggy. She has a clipboard on one hip and on the other, her forearm rests ever so lightly on her side arm's holster. She and Phillips and Erskine are watching the women unload themselves and their luggage from the back of an Army truck: a dozen, maybe, these first few candidates to join Erskine's imagined group of super soldiers. Right now they look less like superwomen and more like a ladies' baseball team in ill-fitting new Army-green uniforms. "I don't much hold with an all-male command structure, but we work with what we're given. Don't we, sir?"

He shoots her a sidelong glance, to which she arches one eyebrow questioningly. But Erskine forestalls whatever riposte is forthcoming: "Women understand what it means to be put in a position of weakness, of powerlessness. Few men are in a better position to comprehend the value of being given strength, of the responsibility of power."

"I don't know," Phillips grumbles. "Shouldn't they at least be wearin' skirts?"

Peggy ignores him. The last straggler out of the truck is having trouble pulling her duffel bag out of the back; it's too heavy for her to lift over the edge. Peggy glances back over her shoulder, but Erskine and Phillips are busily nattering back and forth about just how the hell Erskine got the US government to shell out this much money to get girls on the front lines. She hands Erskine her clipboard (he accepts it without pausing mid-sentence) and strides over to the truck.

The other women have already cleared out in the direction of the barracks by now, so it's not until Peggy is standing directly over the new recruit that she's struck by the other woman's size. Or lack thereof, really – the kid can't be a hair over five feet in her boots. She's got pale blonde hair in two thin braids, one hanging over each shoulder, and the thickest spectacles Peggy has ever seen, through which she blinks myopically upward. "Let me help you with that," Peggy says briskly, and the recruit stumbles back. It's short work for Peggy to heft the bag up and out of the truck bed, and it drops into the dirt at their feet.

"Thank you, miss," the recruit says, and flushes bright red. She flounders her way into an American-style salute. "I mean, ma'am. Sir?"

"Agent will do. Agent Carter."

"Stephanie Rogers," the recruit says, and breaks the salute. Peggy notices her throw just the briefest of forlorn looks in the direction of the barracks – not close by any measure – before Rogers bends down and picks up the strap of the duffel. When she stands up with the strap across her narrow shoulders, the back end of the bag is still dragging in the dirt.

"If you require assistance," Peggy begins, but Rogers cuts her off with a smile and a shrug.

"Thank you, Agent, but I'll be fine." And Peggy watches her trudge off.

Behind her, Erskine murmurs something to Phillips, but Phillips only guffaws, and walks away.

It's the sunny afternoon that Stephanie pulls the pin out of the flagpole to win herself a jeep ride back to base that Peggy decides she rather likes this young lady. Stephanie makes pleasant, mildly awkward conversation about the weather (warm), her hometown (Brooklyn), crossword puzzles (apparently there is one in the New York Times now), and baseball (baseball, baseball, baseball). She's still not sure why Stephanie is still in the program – by Erskine's say-so alone, she's fairly certain, as Phillips is far from impressed – but she's glad of it. The other girls on the most part aren't as good of company. There's Harmony Furmintz, a college track star who is also a star in the classroom – rumor is that she only narrowly missed out on being named the first female Fulbright scholar – but she'd rather spend time with a book than another person. Jackie Windmere and Gilda Hodge might have gotten along well enough; they're both Olympic athletes (Jackie a shot-putter, Gilda the fourth place taker in the javelin throw in Berlin in 1936) … but Jackie is black and Gilda is a bigot, and they are constantly engaged in finding new and exciting ways to torment one another.

So Stephanie is Peggy's favorite – not necessarily for the project: though she despairs at the thought of Gilda Hodge ramped up on super-soldier serum, the prospect of little Stephanie Rogers sent to the front lines doesn't exactly warm Peggy's heart either. But her favorite to have around, nonetheless. She tries not to show favoritism, and on the whole succeeds – she is a professional, after all. But it's a late afternoon training session and Peggy is shouting push-ups out of her panting charges, and Stephanie's asthmatic wheezing is getting even louder than usual. Peggy switches them to jumping jacks, and guiltily considers calling an early halt to the activity. Gilda and Jackie will probably carry on working out on their own anyway, and if she—

"_Grenade!_"

Impossible – a grenade in camp? It must be a training dud, but only Peggy realizes that. She reacts quickly … but not first. That's Stephanie – she's running forward even as the other women are scrambling backward and diving behind cover. She throws herself forward, flinging herself flat on the ground and curling her little body around the grenade. "Get back!" she shrieks at Peggy, shoving at her vainly across the empty air between them. Then she folds back in around the grenade, covering it with herself. She is still, Peggy is still, everyone and everything is perfectly still across the space of several shaky breaths. Then Stephanie lifts her head, uncomprehendingly holding the still-sleeping grenade. Peggy bends down, holds out a hand, and Stephanie passes the grenade over to her. "Is this a joke?" Stephanie asks her, her face red and crimped with hurt. Peggy has no answer, and so she looks over her shoulder at Erskine and Phillips. They are watching – of course – the first looking smug, and the second stunned.

"Women don't have guts?" Erskine says, a gentle jab, obviously a quote thrown back in the other man's face.

Phillips only huffs. "She's still scrawny," he says, and stalks off.

Peggy looks back to Stephanie, but her face has already re-set itself and she has regained her feet. "Any more jumping jacks today?" she asks, as the other women reluctantly emerge from hiding.

They choose Stephanie for the project. After the grenade, it's almost inevitable, but Peggy manages to set aside her sense of inexorableness (and foreboding) until she and Stephanie are in the backseat of a car, being driven through the crowded streets of Brooklyn. Stephanie idly points out personal landmarks: "That's the magazine I sent some of my comics too," she says. "Didn't buy any. Well. Not that time. I sent a couple in under the name Steve once, and they picked up a couple. I didn't send them any more after that." A few moments of silence broken only by the car's humming engine. "I used to work in that advertising firm till the manager tried to – I, uh, I don't work there anymore."

It occurs to Peggy that she doesn't actually know what Stephanie did as a job before she came to the program, that she doesn't really know who this woman is. She asks now, and Stephanie wryly points out one final landmark.

"P.S. 321. I taught elementary school art."

They lapse into companionable silence for the duration of the ride. Peggy escorts Stephanie through the dusty bookstore front, and all too soon Stephanie is shivering in a too-big tank top and boxer shorts, beneath the coolly judgmental gaze of the rows and rows of G-men in the seats above. Peggy paces slightly as Erskine and his assistants settle Stephanie into the pod that will turn her from a Brooklyn bobby-soxer to Erskine's first super soldier. From above, Peggy watches the small shoulders flinch as Erskine administers an antibiotic, and then the pod draws back away from the crowd and closes finally around Stephanie Rogers.

Erskine orders Howard Stark to start routing power to the pod, and with his usual dry aplomb, Stark complies. The lights flicker in spite of Stark's assurances, but they do stay on, and the pod hums to life. Peggy can't hear the gurgle of the serum draining into their chambers, but she sees their levels drop across the room, and she holds her breath, and she waits as Howard puts his shoulder into slowly, insistently, ramping up the voltage running through the wires that crisscross the ground beneath their feet.

The first scream breaks into a sob, and Phillips is on his feet at once. "Cut the power!" he says, over the dismayed murmurs of the government suits around him, "shut it down!" Howard is already reaching for the controls, and Peggy is halfway down the stairs, when the shrill voice echoes out of the pod.

"No! Let me do this! I can do it!"

Of course she _can_ do it, Peggy knows that. She also knows that this ordeal _can_ kill Stephanie. Peggy shoots a mute appeal across the room at Erskine. He returns her gaze mutely, sympathetically, with one hand resting just over the seam of the pod as if he intends to pull it open with brute strength alone. Stephanie's choice, not theirs. There is no more screaming, but a dull, distant groaning suffuses the room – Stephanie's, undercut with the overtaxed machinery. Peggy, unable to hear anymore, is just about to order Howard to shut it down, shut the whole thing down, but the matter is taken out of her control as the whole thing shuts down on its own. The pod cranks heavily back to the floor, and everyone in the room holds their breath as the doors part.

Erskine is already there, taking Stephanie by the arm and helping her down. Her eyes are bleary, not quite focused – but still Stephanie's eyes, and they catch Peggy's across the room. Still Stephanie's smile, too, if a little worse for the wear. Peggy remembers how her legs work and rushes down the stairs, just behind Howard, who takes Stephanie's other arm as she stumbles free of the pod. Stephanie's eyes, and Stephanie's smile, but that's about it – she towers over Peggy now, and yes, Erskine and Howard too, at least six feet tall in her bare feet. Her legs are huge, and her arms too, looking rather out of place encircled by Howard's thin engineer's hands. He doesn't seem to mind, and gives Stephanie a hardy slap on the back as she regains her own footing, as if this is a long-lost kid sister who has stepped out of their contraption. "Can we get this poor kid a jacket?" he shouts, jocular with his success, and a sweatshirt and pair of pants are handed over by the stunned nurse.

Howard and Erskine are swallowed up by the celebrating crowd, leaving Peggy and Stephanie face to face in the chaos. "You all right, Agent?" Stephanie asks, and Peggy laughs, looking up into the big, earnest face.

"I feel short," she confesses, and Stephanie grins at her in the split second before the gunshot.

Peggy falls into gear at once. Erskine: on the floor. The assassin: stuffing a vial of super serum into his suit's breast pocket on his way up the stairs. Peggy's gun is in her hand and she fires – too late. She suppresses the flash of anger that tells her to discharge the rest of her ammunition in frustration, and pounds up the stairs after him.

It takes her a moment to find him in the street outside, but he quickly makes it easy enough. She swivels at the sound of the car engine and finds him bearing down on her behind the wheel of a Studebaker. She fires once, twice, and the car is still oncoming. She is certain that third bullet is the one that will pierce his brain even if the car, with a corpse's foot on the accelerator, won't stop in time. Her finger tightens—

And she goes tumbling across the pavement, jostled but sheltered from the worst of the blow by the huge body beneath hers. "What are you doing?" she shouts into Stephanie's startled face. "I had a shot!"

"Sorry," Stephanie says, "Sorry." She lets Peggy go, steps back, looks around wildly for a second in the direction the car has gone. "Sorry," she repeats, a little blankly, and then takes off at a dead run along the sidewalk in her bare feet.

"Stephanie!" Peggy shouts after her, but she is gone.

The next time Peggy sees Stephanie Rogers, it is on a newsreel. "This dame's carrying the torch for freedom!" proclaims the titles. "And all of America carries a torch for her!" There's singing and dancing from a pack of faux GI's who proclaim a ridiculously be-costumed Stephanie their sweetheart. "Captain America: Commander in chief of our hearts!" Peggy narrows her eyes – she can't imagine they'd ever have given any "Steve Rogers" a fake gun and a silly mask and a pair of tights, and paraded him around like a trained parrot. But here is Stephanie, reciting a trite speech to flog war bonds and smiling nervously at the audience. Some of the kids in the audience gasp – Adolf Hitler himself is sneaking up behind the good Captain. Stephanie turns at the last possible second, and buries her knee in "Hitler's" groin. The man collapses to the floor amid a flurry of applause and laughter from the audience: whether at the man's feigned pain, or at the spectacle of Stephanie, Peggy can't say. She gets up and walks out of the theatre, angry at the waste of potential, but also angry at herself.

She doesn't remember what Stephanie's face looked like, in that first moment after Erskine had been killed. She hadn't even looked. She wonders if Stephanie is as alone in her grief as Peggy is in the guilt of shouted last words. Of a turned back. Of a store-bought sympathy card sent late and returned with no forwarding address. And the waste, the waste, the terrible waste …

It's a year and six time zones away that they finally meet again face to face. Peggy has learned that the base where she and Phillips and their team have put in is the same base that the USO tour is currently passing through. She takes the first opportunity to slip into the back of the show, to sit through the agonizing shouts of, "What's under that jacket, honey?" and "This ain't the kind of girlie show I was expecting!" Stephanie's face turns red as she stammers through her rote routine, trying her best to ignore the ribaldry and deliver her stilted lines.

She finally trails off when someone asks her if her tits are red, white, and blue, too. "I'm just here trying to help," she protests, and a man near the front stands up.

"I got something you can help me with," he says, and grabs his crotch.

Two of the muscular make-believe doughboys come piling out from backstage. "Knock it off, man, or you'll wish you hadn't."

"Oh yeah?" The GI steps across the benches, puts one foot on stage, and leers at the other two guys. "You two nancies gonna teach me a lesson?"

"No," says Stephanie. Even from the back row Peggy can tell her face is a little angry, and quite a bit weary. "_I_ am." With the careful aim she must have gained nutting a hundred Hitlers, she plants her boot in the offender's chest. He goes flying over three rows of his startled compatriots and lands, sprawling, across several laps. "I'm not red, white, and blue under my uniform," Stephanie shouts at him as he flounders. "But you're gonna be black and blue under yours if I hear one more word out of you. Got it?"

He nods, struck silent with either pain or surprise, and Stephanie gestures to her two fellow actors. "Show's over." They stride off stage and the band hurries to launch into a cheery version of "Daphne", which suffers a bit for being played on a trombone, trumpet, and drum rather than Django's original guitar and violin. The men don't seem to mind overmuch, and quickly resume their original rowdiness.

Peggy finds Stephanie doodling aimlessly backstage: a monkey on a unicycle that was grotesquely proportioned into the shape of a pinup girl, something straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. "Interesting choice," she says, and Stephanie looks up.

"Agent Carter," she says, and her smile is ironic. "Came to see the show, huh? Did you want your program signed?"

"Tough crowd," she says, and sits on the table next to where Stephanie is working. "The 107th has really lost some of its best and brightest lately."

Stephanie nods distantly for a moment, and then her head snaps around. "The 107th?"

"Yes," Peggy says, and Stephanie abruptly stands and strides away. Peggy glances down at the pages of the dog-eared sketchbook as they're stirred by the breeze of Stephanie's departure. There are more sketches of the terrible monkey-girl, but behind that, earlier on, the sketches are of a human woman, with dark hair and dark flashing eyes. Peggy turns red and slams the book shut, and hurries after Stephanie.

She finds her confronting Colonel Phillips, who is in the middle of putting his foot down. "Sorry," he tells Stephanie. "I don't send cheerleaders off to fight Nazis and Hydra agents. Those fellas aren't in the habit of dropping dead just because someone shakes her pom-poms at 'em. Now, if you'll 'scuse me." He nods a curt courtesy. "Agent. _Captain_."

"Stephanie, what's going on?" Peggy asks, and Stephanie turns to her, her expression thrown open wide by fear and determination both.

"Bucky," she says. "Sergeant Barnes, I mean. My best friend. They've got him, I know they do."

Peggy feels an obscure stab of something like jealousy, and swims through it by tugging free a map from the pile on the colonel's desk and jabbing her finger at a point on the map. "Here. The prisoners are being held here. A Hyrda base, but Stephanie, it's at least thirty miles behind their lines—"

"Thank you," Stephanie says, her voice suffused with warmth and gratitude, "thank you, Agent – thanks, Peggy." She starts to bolt for a second time, but Peggy grabs her arm.

"Stephanie, did you hear what I said? It's thirty miles behind enemy lines, maybe more if these maps are out of date!" Stephanie's expression doesn't shed one iota of mulishness, and Peggy suppresses a sigh as she feels something give way inside herself. "I mean … how are you even going to get there?"

Stephanie pauses. "Steal a jeep, I guess?" She ends on an up note, making the statement into a sheepish question.

Peggy shakes her head. "I have a better idea."

Twenty minutes later, they are sitting in the back of Howard Stark's shuddering aircraft. Stephanie has thrown a pair of army-issue trousers and a battered leather jacket that – even on her expanded frame – is a size or so two large. A blue painted helmet rides low on her face, but not quite low enough to conceal the slightly concerned pinch of her brows. "Howard is the best civilian pilot we have," Peggy promises Stephanie, but somehow Stephanie doesn't seem very much reassured by this. The carefree, casual banter issuing forth from the cockpit doesn't seem to be helping, either: Howard's offer to take Stephanie for fondue on the flight home make Stephanie's face flush red, and she takes a sudden intense interest in the straps of her parachute harness. Peggy's about to open her mouth to tell Howard to keep the chatter a bit more professional – Stephanie has quite enough to worry about without having to wonder if her pilot has his head in the game – when the prop-plane is rocked by machine gun fire.

"We got incoming!" Howard shouts, and the plane careens left. Peggy and Stephanie bounce against their restrains, and their eyes meet across the cabin. "It's now or never, kiddo," Howard warns, and Stephanie frees herself from her seat immediately and rushes to the edge of the opening ramp.

She pauses at the cusp for a moment, buffeted by blasting winds, and looks back at Peggy. "Be careful," Peggy says, and Stephanie grins crookedly back.

"Always am," she says, and steps over the edge into the bottomless night. Peggy has a sudden, dreadful premonition that this will be her life: condemned to watch Stephanie Rogers fly away from her and wait in the hopes of her return. A silly thing, really – she dismisses the thought at once. She has no business expecting she will have a reason to tag after Rogers, nor that Rogers will want to be tagged after. What nonsense! She will remember this blithe dismissal some months hence, when there is no longer a hope of Stephanie's returning, and wonder what she could have done differently, and know that there was nothing.

Three days later, Peggy sits still and listens to Phillips dictate the missive to the home office that details the rather murky circumstances of Stephanie Rogers disappearance and likely death in action. He finishes his dictation, and only now looks at where Peggy is lurking in the flap of his tent. "Wonder how it might've been that the young lady figured out where she was going," he says.

The accusation hangs in the air. "I gave her the chance to do the right thing," Peggy says, with more conviction than she feels. "It's more than you can say."

Phillips takes off his glasses, looks down his nose at her. "You sent that girl to her death, Agent Carter, and that weight's on your shoulders now."

Peggy feels that weight already, feels nearly crushed by it, but isn't willing to concede the point. "Colonel, I—"

They both react at the same time to the noise from outside: men shouting, and – is that the distant rumble of oncoming tanks? Peggy's hand goes to her holster immediately, and they both hurry out of the tent. Tanks, yes. And men shouting, that as well, but not with dread – with joy. Peggy stands in shock and stares at the column of some few hundred men, and tanks, and jeeps, pouring toward her. And at the forefront …

"I think you'll have to have your secretary tear up that dictation," she says to Phillips, who is similarly arrested by surprise beside her. At the head of the column of men is Stephanie Rogers, her helmet dinged up and her jacket ripped, but alive and whole and bashfully grinning. There's a handsome young man walking at her side, his arm draped around her neck like it's always been there, jeering and laughing with the boys around him – the elusive Sergeant Barnes, Peggy guesses. She sets the matter aside and walks up to Stephanie with her arms folded across her chest. "You're late," she informs Stephanie, and Stephanie has the good grace to blush as she pulls out her radio transmitter (or what's left of it).

"My carriage turned into a pumpkin," she says, and elbows Barnes in the side. "And my coachman turned back into a rat."

"Hey," says Barnes, and Peggy can hear in a single syllable that they've known each other for a lifetime, these two, that the sergeant knew Stephanie when she was still only Stephanie and not yet a star-spangled super soldier, and she resents for a split second that she's not the only one who can claim such a privilege. "You gonna beat me up after you go to all the trouble of rescuing me?"

"Rogers!" says Phillips, from behind Peggy. He seems to have recovered his standard gruff bravado. "You did all this?" _You did all this without orders?_ is the implied question lying just beneath the first.

"Yes, sir," says Stephanie, answering both, and meets his glare head-on. "I'm willing to submit myself to whatever disciplinary action you see fit."

Phillips looks around at the hundreds of men, the liberated tanks and machine guns and ammo that Rogers has brought with her. He coughs. "I think, under the circumstances, I might be convinced to let it slide. This once."

"That's right!" shouts Barnes, all post-adrenal pride and glee. "Let's hear it for Captain America!" The crowd around them bursts into cheers, and Peggy's heart swells at the sight of it, Stephanie hoisted up on the shoulders of those who'd now call themselves her fellow soldiers. They sweep by Peggy and the colonel, and for a brief moment, Stephanie's hand clasps Peggy's shoulder on the way past.

After the past year of skipping across North Africa and Europe from battlefield to battlefield, flying back to Brooklyn is like going to another planet. Phillips and Stephanie hunker down over a map, and Stephanie recreates from memory the layout of the Hydra bases she had spotted during her rescue mission. "I'm going to take them out, one at a time," Stephanie tells Phillips. There's steel in her tone. "With your help or without it."

Phillips nods. Peggy can't say what's been going on in his head since Stephanie Rogers returned with 400 POWs, but she can't help but think it's change for the better. "We'll get you a team."

"No," says Stephanie, and Phillips raises his eyebrows. "I've already got a team picked out."

Stephanie goes to meet this elite team of hers in a Brooklyn dive bar. She'll go alone, she says – they understand each other, she and this team. Peggy lets her go – or, more correctly, Phillips does – and tries not to think back on the kind of greeting Stephanie got from her fellow servicemen at the ill-fated USO show. At the last minute she decides that she, too, will put in an appearance at the bar. She's on her way home to get her purse when she notices the first of them: the little girls playing in the street, their hair tied back in familiar twin braids, a cast-iron pot on their heads like helmets and carrying a tattered newspaper tied to a stick, crayoned to look like an America flag. Peggy's heart beats a little faster. She thinks to herself, _maybe this will work. Maybe things will be different from here on out._ She goes home, and now it's for a change of clothes as well as her purse.

She finds Stephanie, where she might have expected: sitting at the bar with Bucky Barnes. Stephanie blissfully, charmingly stunned at the sight of Peggy. "Is this seat taken?" Peggy asks, and it's Bucky who scurries up to pull the chair out for her. He asks her something, and Peggy acknowledges it with a shell of a response. "Howard wants you to come in tomorrow morning to try out some new equipment."

"I'll be there," Stephanie says earnestly.

Bucky takes a step back, puts his hands up. "Drinks? Ladies? The round's on me."

"Nah, I'm good," says Stephanie, at the same moment Peggy says, "I buy my own drinks, thank you."

Bucky eyes the pair of them for a moment, and Peggy gets the feeling there's more going on beneath the easy haze of beer than is entirely apparent. Then he grins, off-handedly, and edges closer to where the bartender is lurking down at the other end. "'Kay. More for me, then, right?"

He swans off, and Stephanie turns back to Peggy. There's a refrain of terrible singing from the next room, voices raised cheerfully if not in tune, and Peggy turns her head to listen for a moment. A faintly horrified expression must creep onto her face, because Stephanie laughs. "My team. You're impressed, I'm sure."

"They certainly are making an impression."

Stephanie leans toward her, elbows on the bar. Her face is a bit flushed, whether with the beer or the warmth of the room. "Don't like drinking, don't like music. What do you like?"

"I like a glass of wine and a dance hall as much as the next woman in line," Peggy protests.

"Well," Stephanie says, "I think the next woman in line might be me."

The look Stephanie gives her is so wide open that Peggy freezes where she's sitting. "It's … it's not that simple Captain, is it?" There's a moment of terrible silence, two, three, where she can't quite meet Stephanie's eyes. And then Bucky is back with a foaming mug in hand to save her from having to try to salvage the conversation – Peggy slides down off her barstool and says, "Tomorrow morning, Captain."

Stephanie's face folds in on itself, shutting down whatever was so plainly on display a moment before. "I'll be there, Agent. You just say when."

"Eight hundred hours," Peggy says, purposefully ignoring the double meaning, and Stephanie nods.

As she walks out the door, Peggy hears Bucky's voice. "Man, oh man. Invisible. Is this what it feels like to be you?"

Stephanie's reply is wry. "Don't worry, Bucky, you're still the prettiest girl in school and I'm sure you'll get a date for prom."

The next day, Peggy walks into the lab to find Stephanie Rogers and Howard Stark wrapped up in each other's arms.

She can Stephanie's face, over Howard's shoulder, and the woman is laughing and breathless – Peggy gets the impression that she might have just been swinging him around in a circle as if he were the heroine of a period romantic drama. But then Stephanie opens her eyes and sees Peggy there, and flushes scarlet. "I see my presence won't be required for the testing," she says coolly, and turns on one heel.

"Peggy, wait – it's not what you – Howard offered me—"

"Yes, I can well guess what Mr. Stark had to offer the next woman in line," Peggy snaps.

"No, I mean – well, Peggy, _look_ at this!" Stephanie drags a silver-colored shield off the table behind her and holds it up beseechingly. Peggy doesn't bite on the distraction attempt. She draws her firearm and fires two shots at Stephanie, who ducks behind the shield. The bullets clang out in quick succession and drop to the ground at Stephanie's feet.

"What do you know," Peggy says, as Howard and Stephanie exchange a helpless glance. She re-holsters her pistol and walks out of the room. "It works."

Stephanie and her team are on their way back to Italy by the time Howard managers to corner her long enough for her to hear him out. "She just wanted to know what your favorite wine was and where you like to go out dancing – I offered to pick up a bottle of Château Mazeran next time I'm doing a drop in Free France." Howard shakes his head and goes on to demonstrate what an utter idiot a genius can be sometimes. "Man, Peggy, I think the kid wants to be you when she grows up; you could give her a break once in a while!"

Peggy buys more movie tickets than she used to, and sometimes there is a clip of Captain America fighting in occupied Europe in the newsreel, and sometimes there is a glimpse of the compass the captain carries with her, and sometimes you can tell that the empty side of the case has been filled with a sketch of a beautiful woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a distant look. There is once, only once, that she and Phillips bump into each other in the lobby of the cinema and he settles into the seat next to her before the show begins, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat when Rogers unfolds her compass on screen, but he doesn't say anything to Peggy and Peggy has nothing to say anyway.

She begs Howard to make a Trans-Atlantic flight as soon as they hear the news. It's not a tough sell; Howard seems to think he has adopted Stephanie as a younger sister or perhaps a daughter (he doesn't seem to think he'll ever get around to having kids of his own, as taking a fully-grown person under his wing is much less complicated). She finds Stephanie in a bar once more, but this time, Stephanie is alone but for a tall bottle of Italian grappa and an empty glass.

All this way across the world and she hasn't stopped to think of what to say now. She's still at a loss when the creak of her shoe on the floor gives her away. Stephanie looks up, then back down at the table. She swipes once at the tearstains on her face, then gives up. "Dr. Erskine said it wouldn't just be my muscles that changed. My bones. It's every cell in me. My cells are constantly regenerating … my metabolism … something." She knocks the glass off of the table. It shatters amid the wreckage already on the floor. "Which means … I can't get drunk."

"Your metabolism is four times faster than the average woman's. We always knew it could be a side effect …"

"I got Bucky killed, Peggy," says Stephanie, and Peggy's chest hurts.

She lays one hand on Stephanie's arm. "All these people who have told you that you couldn't do this – couldn't be a soldier, couldn't make a difference. You didn't let them make the choice for you. Would you have made the choice for your friend, even if you could have?"

Stephanie shakes her head dully.

"This is not your fault. Sergeant Barnes was a good man and he died fighting beside a woman – an officer – who was damn well worth it. This is _not your fault_, Stephanie."

"I'm going to take them apart," Stephanie says to the tabletop. "Every last Hydra base in ashes. Every last Hydra operative dead or in chains."

"_We're_ going to take them apart." Stephanie looks up, and Peggy smiles a shark's smile. "You have a team. Remember?"

Peggy remembers that quiet promise in the ruined bar as they are roaring down a rapidly shortening runaway in the Red Skull's roadster toward a plane carrying dozens of Hydra agents and Johann Schmidt himself. For a dizzying moment, she wonders if perhaps they should have had a _bigger_ team.

Then she realizes that Stephanie is standing up on the passenger seat, gearing up to take a leap. "Wait!" she half-shrieks, and Stephanie looks down in surprise. Peggy grabs the front of her uniform, pulls Stephanie's face down to hers, kisses her firmly, solidly. Stephanie's mouth hangs onto hers for another moment after she breaks free. "Go get him – for both of us," she says, and then Captain America turns stupidly to Phillips with her lipstick-smeared mouth hanging rather wide open.

Phillips has been studiously ignoring the display at his elbow. "I don't kiss girls young enough to be my daughter!" he shouts, and adds under his breath as Stephanie gears up to make the leap, "just in case."

Stephanie goes flying with superhuman strength and her enormous arms wrap around the landing gear. Peggy watches as she's swallowed up by the landing bay even as Phillips curses, and cranks the steering wheel, and it's only when the roadster's back left wheel goes spinning off the edge of the cliff that she loses sight of her hero for the last time.

There are still enough Hydra agents left in the base to give them a fair bit of trouble, and yet Stephanie's Howling Commandos have, to their great credit, the place locked down within twenty minutes. Stephanie finds the radio control room and occupies it with a quiet desperation that clears out the room of everyone else save Phillips. She's waiting with her hand on the controls when the voice crackles out of the speaker: "Anyone read me? Testing, one, two, three – hello?"

"Stephanie!" She seizes the transmitter, clutches it to herself with relief. "Is that you?"

"Peggy!" Stephanie's voice is heavy under the happy exclamation. "We got him, Peggy. Schmidt's dead."

"And the plane?" Peggy asks, breathless now.

There's a moment of quiet. "I can fly it," says Stephanie. "More or less. That's, uh. That's not the issue. Peggy, it's full of bombs, and it's headed for New York."

Peggy scrabbles at the maps lying around the control room desk. "Read me your coordinates and I'll find you a safe place to land."

"I said I could fly the thing," Stephanie says, a little wearily. "Landing, though …"

"Howard!" Peggy grabs at the name like a lifeline. "I'll have them send for Howard, get him on the line – he'll know what to do, and we'll—"

"How far out is Howard from where you are now?"

Twenty minutes. Maybe more. She knows it's too long – they both know it. The silence hangs between them, too full of what they can't say and too empty of anything to change it.

"I'm going to put her in the water," says Stephanie finally, and Peggy puts her face in her hands.

"No! We'll think of something – I'll think of something."

"There's a lot of people who don't think a gal from Brooklyn has the guts to do what has to be done," Stephanie says. It could have sounded mocking, from someone else. Not from her, though. "Peggy. I gotta do this, or people are going to die."

"Please," says Peggy, and hasn't any request to attach the word to.

Words fail them both for a few moments. Then Stephanie's voice, still strong and clear despite the distance and the dreadful connection: "Peggy?"

"I'm still here."

"Whatcha doing tomorrow morning?"

Peggy swallows hard. "Taking breakfast. There's a little café in Rome … would you care to join me?"

"I don't know," says Stephanie. "Are you going to make me drink tea? That stuff seems awful complicated, and I like to keep things simple. What time are we talking now?"

"Eight hundred hours. Will you be available, do you suppose?"

"I already told you, Peggy. Any—"

The line turns to static. Peggy drops the transmitter, her arms fall limp at her sides. She can feel tears streaming down her face but can't seem to do anything about them. Colonel Phillips is there, suddenly, a handkerchief in hand and a tired, sad look on his face. "You girls—" he says, and can't seem to find a way to finish the sentence. "You girls," he repeats, and shakes his head as he folds his arm around Peggy's shoulders.

The newspaper headlines talk about women's place in war, about what kind of decision-making put America's golden girl on the front lines – even behind them! Colonel Phillips takes the early retirement he's quietly offered and moves to Florida; Peggy gets a postcard with a St. Petersburg postmark on in now and again.

There's talk of a statue to be built in Central Park, but that idea is soon folded up and put away – might inspire the wrong kind of virtues in another generation of women. They put a park bench there instead, and put Stephanie's name on a plaque on it – not even her title. Peggy sits on the bench from time to time, and runs her fingers over the little bronze plate and imagines the words "Captain America" underneath the name, where they belong. And maybe Manhattan is the wrong borough for a park like this, anyway. One day Peggy comes to sit and finds someone has roughly carved out a subtitle to Stephanie's name. _Our Brooklyn Gal_, it says, in steady, even letters.

There are children who come to play in the park – playing at being cowboys, and pirates, and yes, still soldiers too. Mostly they're boys, but every now and then a girl will come a long, with a iron-pot helmet and a painted garbage can shield. _Anytime_, Peggy wills the world to change, for these girls and for herself and for the lost one whose ocean-sized grave isn't enough to contain her heart. _Anytime. Anytime now, come on_.


End file.
